Sunday, September 11, 2011

After green curry

When I was in Thailand, I took an afternoon cooking class and one of the highlights was making my own green curry.

We rode a Rot Dang to some sheet-metal pole barn, and got a lesson from the only "cooking school" in Chaing Mai that advertised itself as "vegetarian friendly." It was a blinding hot paste of green chilis, toasted spices, and the general Thai menagerie of cilantro, coriander, galangal, etc.

Since I foolishly left that cookbook at my folks' house, and haven't been able to get it back, I've been flailing along with a succession of green curry recipes, most recently this one.

Because you go to the stove with the ingredients that you've got, not the ingredients that you'd like (well, more that I don't really plan shopping by recipes), Amy and I made a series of substitutions from almost the giddyup. Our recipe follows:

It came out well, tasting halfway between a green curry and a yellow one, and very spicy. We didn't have a blender, so it was mostly chopped and blended with a mortar and pestle. There are half a dozen ways I could make it more authentic, but it was damn tasty and tomorrow we're going to scramble it with eggs (and maybe rice noodles).